TNB Bookstore

In the summer of 2013, author and journalist D.R. Haney (Banned for Life; Subversia) rented Room 32 at the Alta Cienega Motel in West Hollywood, California, a room which for three years served as the hermetic home of the late Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors. Haney’s idea: rent the room, get some booze, throw a party—and hire a psychic medium to try and conjure Morrison’s spirit.

Room 32 is a masterfully written, deeply fascinating, and wonderfully strange account of what happened next and why, all these years later, Morrison’s legend still looms large.

Edited by Brad Listi and Justin Benton, Board is a groundbreaking work of literary collage derived entirely from comment boards of this website, The Nervous Breakdown, an online culture magazine and literary community founded in 2006. Board is a unique artifact of the Internet Age and the digital revolution in publishing. A cacophony of voices. What your computer screen sounds like, only better. Strangely moving. Painfully honest. And shockingly funny and mean. Essential reading for anyone who spends too much time sitting slack-jawed in front of a keyboard.

Expertly interweaving its leitmotifs—technology, dreams, sex food, ‘identity politics,’ death—Board is a book in conversation with itself about a culture at war with itself. A sharp, funny, and unexpectedly moving take on contemporary America in the digital age.

—David Shields, author of Reality Hunger and How Literature Saved My Life

What is beauty? Why do women usually think they are not beautiful, and what do women (and men) find truly beautiful in life? These important questions are answered in The Beautiful Anthology: Essays, Poems & Art, the new book from the acclaimed literary site The Nervous Breakdown (TNB Books). The answers will surprise you, shock you, amuse you, and make you think. Contributors to The Beautiful Anthology include best-selling authors Jessica Anya Blau, Melissa Febos, Robin Antalek, Gina Frangello, and many more, for an eclectic, international combination of established and emerging writers and artists all riffing entertainingly on the theme of beauty.

Subverting time-worn clichés about beauty, this book delivers a fresh exploration of everything from body art and big noses to musical ‘perfection’ and misguided parenting.

In this hilarious collection of personal essays, Lenore Zion offers up her unique perspective on everything from foot fungi to prep school to day spas to dead birds. At once macabre, irreverent, beautiful, and unsettling, My Dead Pets Are Interesting is, in the end, an unimpeachably funny journey into the depths of Zion’s mind.

Lenore Zion takes readers on a journey down the rabbit hole of the human condition. It is beautiful. It is ugly. And it is brilliant.

Ted McCagg is not an artist by trade. In fact he has spent the last 15 years in the world of advertising as a writer. He did take a drawing class in college, but only because it was considered an easy A. Now, for the first time, his cartoons are collected where they have always longed to live: the printed page. His work, which has won him a legion of fans throughout cyberspace, is a regular feature on The Nervous Breakdown, and has appeared elsewhere on the web at The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Laughing Squid.

Ted McCagg is a truly original thinker who really makes me laugh. And for that, I hate him.

In this bare-knuckled, frankly autobiographical collection, D.R. Haney shares a series of personal essays on his life, struggles, and artistic evolution; from punk rock malcontent in 1980s New York, to B-movie actor in the films of Roger Corman; to screenwriter on Friday the 13th: Part VII; to expatriated American writer in Serbia; to author of the celebrated underground novel Banned for Life. Consisting of material originally published by the popular online literary magazine The Nervous Breakdown, Subversia is written with the bracing candor and lyrical beauty that have earned Haney a well-deserved cult following worldwide.